Ode to the Clothesline
By Kwame Dawes
After Alfred Stieglitz
Not so much the missing of things
but the nostalgia of colors, their music,
the ordinary revelation of a family’s life
caught in the flop and dance, a jig,
if you will, of their layers, outer and inner skins,
the secret things so close to the body,
the taste, the salt and sweet of blood, and shit,
and piss, and then, rinsed and scrubbed, leaving
beneath the astringent scent of soap
a musky marker of self for strays
to smell or imagine as they walk
past the parade of the living
on taut lines, propped by poles
with nails for a hook, above
the startling green of grass and hedge,
the barefaced concrete steps,
the sky, inscrutable as a wall;
this is what one carries as a kind
of sweetness — the labor of brown hands,
elbow-deep in suds, the rituals
of cleansing, the humility of a darning
or a frayed crotch, the dignity
of cleanliness, the democracy of truth,
the way we lived our lives in the open.
